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Copyright © 2010 Andrea Langworthy
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I love words. When I’m not writing, I’m talking, which qualifies me as a blabbermouth. That’s a favorite word of mine. Better than w00t, Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2007. I wasn’t one of the thousands who voted. Certainly, I wouldn’t have chosen w00t, a word I’d never even heard of until it was proclaimed champion. Spelled with double zeroes in the center, instead of two O’s, w00t became popular in online competitive gaming forums. It’s an expression of joyous victory. The rest of us would say, “Yay!”
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy winning, too, just like the gamers who shout, “W00t! W00t!” I’ve never played games online, though, preferring to compete at the dining room table and engage in rowdy contests of Hangman and Scrabble. When I have no opponents to joust with, I battle the New York Times crossword puzzles. You’d think, being a writer, I could win a match. After all, I look up words in the dictionary daily and I’m never too far from my trusty friend, The Synonym Finder. The book is worn and torn because I’m always on the lookout for the right noun, verb or adjective.
I enjoy other people’s words, too, whether they’re on the page of a newspaper, magazine or book. Imagine being able to string together enough words in just the right fashion that your work could be called a best-seller. Now, that’s a wonderful word.
One of my favorite terms doesn’t easily fit into conversation. Ethnocentrism has stuck with me since a sociology course at Normandale College in the late 1990s. The oldest student in the class by about 30 years, I realized it would have been ethnocentric of me to feel that, because of my age and experience, I knew more or did anything better than the younger generation of students. That would have bordered on hubris, another word taught by the sociology instructor. Hubris is when your ego is your downfall. As my mother liked to say, when you end up with egg on your face.
Before online surfing, I bought a flip calendar that taught a new word every day. I’d repeat it to myself a number of times, then try to use it in conversation so it would become part of my vocabulary. Now, using a search engine, it is easy to locate Web sites that offer the same service. One such quest yielded the word excursive, an adjective that means wandering off or rambling. Something I tend to do. Ramble on about a subject I love—words popping into my head faster than I can write them down.
Audition, which we all know means a try-out, usually for a play or movie role, was on another site. Did you know audition is rooted in the Latin word, audire, and also means the act of hearing?
When Anu Garg, an immigrant from India, came to this country, he must have heard something special in the English words he was learning. Eight years ago, he founded wordsmith.org which teaches a new word a day to subscribers. An article in the New York Times says it “is arguably the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace.” Katie Hafner’s story about Garg is titled, “A Word of the Day Keeps Banality at Bay.”
I looked it up. Banality is the act of being trite. Something I’ll try to avoid in the New Year. If I succeed, we can all shout, “W00t, w00t!”